While we can probably all agree that cheating in online courses is easier to pull off than in a physical classroom, I suspect that this simple intuition is far from the whole story, and that e-cheating is more than just a increased ease of getting away with it. Now it’s just a student sitting alone at home, looking up answers online and simply filling them in. Gone are the quaint days of minutely lettered cheat sheets, formulas written on the underside of baseball cap bills, sweat-smeared key words on students’ palms. When we hear such stories of online cheating, the reasons for this behavior seems rather simple: It doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to come up with ways to cheat on a test when there’s no supervision and the entire Internet is at hand. None of them studied, so the first one or two students often bombed the test, but students who took the test later did quite well. They took the test one at a time, and posted the questions together with the correct answers in a shared Google document as they went. Bob and several friends devised a system to exploit these weaknesses.
The tests were designed in a way that made cheating more difficult, including limited time to take the test, and randomized questions from a large test bank (so that no two students took the exact same test).īut the design of the test had two potential flaws: first, students were informed in real time whether their answers were right or wrong second, they could take the test anytime they wanted. He is representative of a population of students that have striven to keep up with their instructor’s efforts to prevent cheating online. He doesn’t cheat in those courses, he explains, but with a busy work and school schedule, the easy A is too tempting to pass up.īob’s online cheating methods deserve some attention. Interestingly, Bob is enrolled at a public university in the U.S., and claims to work diligently in all his other (classroom) courses. Bob pulled this off, he explained, with the help of a collaborative cheating effort.
He didn’t read a word of his textbook, didn’t participate in discussions, and still got an A. Bob logged in once a week for half an hour in order to take a quiz. The article tells the story of Bob Smith (not his real name, obviously) who was a student in an online science course. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that students cheat more in online than in face-to-face classes.